


Five Stages of Grief

by lunabee34 (Lorraine)



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Episode: s04e01 Adrift, Episode: s04e02 Lifeline, Five Stages of Grief, Gen, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-24
Updated: 2014-03-24
Packaged: 2018-01-16 22:21:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1363855
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lorraine/pseuds/lunabee34
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The beginning of season four from John, Rodney, Teyla, and Elizabeth's perspectives.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Stages of Grief

_Denial_

John cannot believe that Elizabeth is reduced to these things, the white bandage shrouding her head, the fragility of the tendons in her throat as she sleeps. But she isn’t sleeping, he reminds himself; she’s dying quietly behind closed eyelids. There’s a difference. John wants to shake her. He wants to take Elizabeth’s skinny wrists in his hands and squeeze them until she sits up and apologizes for scaring them all. Until she lives. Then Rodney radios with Dr. Keller’s plan and John allows the hope—jagged and oh so sweet—to consume him even as he tells Rodney no.

_Anger_

Elizabeth examines her reflection in the observation window; she appears the same as she did two days ago, the same as she always has. Elizabeth wonders if she will age and then refuses to contemplate the horror of her body continuing to function after Ronon’s bones are laid bare, after Teyla is ground to dust. The sudden need to know that she can still bleed overwhelms and Elizabeth gouges a line into her thigh, under the sheets and hidden from Dr. Keller. The wound closes before she has finished making it and Elizabeth knows she will never see Earth again.

_Bargaining_

Rodney once detonated five sixths of a solar system, planets and moons and the almost eternal pulse of a star lost to his arrogance. Before that he bled despite himself and spilled Atlantis’s secrets as easily as the storm sluiced water down the city’s spires. Much later, he overdosed himself on Wraith enzyme—its red heat, its razor wire seduction—to no end. For nothing. Rodney even ditched his best friend, left him to burn for no reason that he will allow himself to remember. But what’s he’s done to Elizabeth—this will be something different. This is no Doranda. 

_Depression_

Elizabeth’s life will fit neatly into three boxes. Teyla says the Prayer for the Dead as she packs, the words as little comfort to her as they’ve always been. Teyla is intimately familiar with the rites of death. Even if the sacraments vary from culture to culture, the divvying, the portioning of material remains is always the same. Most of Elizabeth’s things are now her mother’s, but she has left Chuck a ceramic ear from MX3-418 and John a wooden engraving of a bird in flight and to Teyla a thin silver chain that will sit high on her collarbone. 

_Acceptance_

“You will never leave this place,” Oberoth says. 

“Maybe not,” Elizabeth says. “But my team will.” She can feel her hold over Oberoth slipping so she focuses on that feeling of power, that sick thrill in her belly when she realized she could manipulate him as easily as he’d once manipulated her. Elizabeth is already dead, a thing she knew when she woke in the infirmary, before Dr. Keller confessed, before Rodney couldn’t look at her without shame. “You can’t stop them, Oberoth,” she says with a smile. Who Elizabeth was is gone, but this newest version—she has potential.


End file.
